On a Intel i5 laptop it typically takes 5 seconds to open a new window
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s an Intel i5 laptop enough to run Vivaldi? 6200U @ 2.30 GHz / 4Gb RAM. It typically takes 5 seconds to open a new window
I use Vivaldi all the time and it's just plain slow on my i5. I constantly have problems with slow response, 5 seconds to open a new window, swapping windows is several seconds, when rendering certain pages the whole browser stops responding, etc. I was considering upgrading to an i7 or i9 laptop. Which one would have the horsepower to run Vivaldi at a decent speed?
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@Chuser Hi,
Do you have any anti-virus software installed? These have been known to interfere with vivaldi sometimes causing slow downs.
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Just the default Defender software that comes with Windows 8.1. No Kapersky, Avast, etc.
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It should be more than enough. I'm using a 10 year old PC I built in 2008 and upgraded in 2010. The most recent upgrade was from 4GB to 8GB of memory and to a Samsung 860 EVO 250GB SSD. Both upgrades have made a world of difference in overall Windows 7 Pro system response. Prior to the upgrade, I was using 4GB of memory and a Seagate 160GB mechanial disk hard drive.
It would be nicer to have more than 4GB of laptop memory because Vivaldi, like every Chrome based browser, sucks up memory left and right. Also, with more memory, there's less disk caching of browser data to the hard drive, which isn't that big a deal speed wise when you have a SSD vs a mechanial disk hard drive. You might check to see if your current laptop memory is upgradeable beyond 4GB and whether or not it's using a mechanical disk hard drive or a SSD. Currently, SSDs are really cheap and I also recently upgraded my brother's 2006 Dell laptop with the same model as I bought. The increased performance difference is very noticeable.
When using Vivaldi, you might want to open up Task Manager by right clicking on the Windows taskbar to Start Task Manager from the pop-up menu. Then while Task Manager is up, click on the "Show Processes From All Users" button on the lower left hand side of the Task Manager box. Beneath the tabs, you'll see several column categories. The primary one of importance is the CPU column. It will show you how much your CPUs aren't being used by showing a large System Idle Process percentage and how much they're being used in related percentages by programs listed under System Idle Process. As of this post typing, System Idle Process for me is showing a 99% CPU idle level, i.e. barely any CPU cores being used.
So, you may see if something else shows up under Task Manager while Vivaldi is running that might be causing a program.Also with Task Manager up, you can click on the Performance tab and graphically see how much work each CPU is doing and how much of your 4GB of memory is being used. Again, 8GB of laptop computer memory would be better and a SSD drive will improve over all laptop speed performance, especially when it comes to disk caching data that can't be held by the computer memory because only 4GB is installed. Yet, prior to my computer memory and SSD upgrades, Vivaldi was still responsive enough to use with 4GB of memory and a mechanical disk hard drive.
If you don't do it often, you might try defragmenting your hard drive, that is, if you have a mechanical hard drive. Per Samsung and probably every other SSD manufacturer, defragmenting is supposed to be unnecessary because all the data on the SSD is equally accessible at the same rate of speed. So, all that needs to be done from time to time is use the SSD manufacturer's TRIM program to maintain SSD performance. For mechanical hard drives, you need to keep them defragmented with either the program Windows includes or some other program.
Two mechanical hard drive defragmenting programs I'll recommend are Smart Defrag 4.4.0.849 and any version of Piriform's Defraggler. The reason I'm recommending an older version of Smart Defrag is because that's the last version when all the features were unlocked and free. Now, you have to pay to get those features unlocked.
If you don't use it that often, use the Disk Cleanup program that comes with the Windows operating system (OS). Also, use it prior to using a disk defragmenting program so you're not wasting your time defragmenting stuff Disk Cleanup would delete to free up space on your hard drive. That type of clutter would include old Windows Update info and additional System Restore Points that can eat up a lot of hard drive space. Usually, I also click on the Disk Cleanup tab that allows me to delete all but the most recent System Restore Point.
What I would also get if you don't already use it is CCleaner. One of the things Chrome and Vivaldi will do is collect a lot of cache data that will suck up hard drive space (500+MB). Unfortunately, neither Chrome nor Vivaldi have an auto-cache cleaning feature. What some people online erroneously refer to as an auto-cache cleaning feature in Chrome that is also in Vivaldi is not an auto-cache cleaning feature. It's listed under vivaldi://settings/privacy as "Clear browsing data", and it'll clear out a lot more than you want if you're not careful with it. This is why I recommending using CCleaner instead.
CCleaner will find a lot of Vivaldi cache files that can be deleted without a problem. Also, it's a good thing to add the path C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\ to CCleaner's Options > Include locations to clean. Another thing you should do is look at the CCleaner Options > Cookies list and find site who's cookies you don't want deleted. Generally, any website where you have to login is going to put a cookie on your in your browser cookie folder after you've authenticated who you are by submitting your username and password. If CCleaner deletes that website cookie after it's given you a previous authentication cookie, you're going to have to type in your username and password over and over again. Granted, if you have a password manager like Roboform, that's not a big deal, but you don't want to repeatedly open your email program or go to your online email inbox to click on a link that authenticates you as having a valid website account.
These are only a few things I can think of that might be helpful to you. Without actually sitting down with your laptop like I've had to do with my brother's laptop to evaluate it's performance, application compatibility, and personal quirks, it's kind of hard to say why you're having problems. If I were to say one last thing, it would be to make sure Vivaldi is set to use gpu hardware acceleration. It should be on by default, but if not, go to vivaldi://settings/system to make sure "Use hardware acceleration when available" is enabled.
Good luck.
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I used to have a i5 760 CPU in my desktop and I ran Vivaldi perfectly fine with it. It's about 20% faster than 6200U, but I still think 6200U should be fine. Are you sure it's not an issue with too little ram or a busy hdd (both can slow down things dramatically)?
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@DBF68 - Correction that I can't make on the post because it's triggering the anti-spam filter:
vivaldi://settings/privacy as "Clear browsing data" should be chrome://settings/privacy
vivaldi://settings/system "Use hardware acceleration when available" should be chrome://settings/system
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@Chuser My laptop is a 2008 Lenovo R61i. I have it maxed out with 3GB of RAM, and an old Core2 Duo processor running at 1.66 GHz. It runs Vivaldi fine.
Opening a new window, since it's three abstraction layers in Vivaldi instead of two like most browsers, and then the UI has to be built like a web page, is a little slower than other browsers. But here, on this old rig, it takes 2 seconds to throw up a new window, and 2 more seconds to fill it in completely. (move tab to new window takes one second, but it's 4 sec total before the page content is built out.)
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whether or not it's using a mechanical disk hard drive or a SSD
Using an SSD.
As of this post typing, System Idle Process for me is showing a 99% CPU idle level, i.e. barely any CPU cores being used.
Task Manager at 0.9%, WMI Provider Host at 2.1%, Vivaldi at 0.8%.
how much of your 4GB of memory is being used.
3.9GB is in use.
make sure "Use hardware acceleration when available" is enabled.
It's enabled.
I just don't know why it's so pokey slow. Usually software gets more bloated with age, as the developers have the latest greatest and performance on old hardware is handwaved away. My laptop is from 2016, I thought maybe it's time to upgrade. None of my other software is so slow.
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@Chuser
Hi, could you please open vivaldis own task manager to have a look if something is consuming an extraordinary bit of ram?
You can open this via Menu --> Tools --> Task Manager or just press "Shift + Esc" -
@Chuser said in On a Intel i5 laptop it typically takes 5 seconds to open a new window:
how much of your 4GB of memory is being used.
3.9GB is in use.This is most likely your problem. You are almost using all your RAM, so when an application wants to use more RAM Windows has to compress some of the existing but not actively used stuff in the RAM and move it to your hard drive. This frees up space in RAM for your application to use, but the process is fairly slow and can cause serious system slowdowns.
Open task manager (Ctrl+Shift+Escape) and check if you have any program running that consumes a lot of RAM that you can close. You'll generally want to use less than 80% of your RAM to ensure that it's not throttling your system's performance.
Edit: If you are looking to upgrade to a new laptop, you should make sure that it has at least 8 GB RAM. Though I would generally suggest 16 GB just to make sure that you can have many applications running simultaneously. Any modern CPU should be more than enough for Vivaldi, so you don't need to worry about that.
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Whoa, never knew that existed. What does "extraordinary" mean? The top task is 362,620 and next down is 352,460 then 238,804 then 146,508 then 119,308 then all the rest are under 100,000.
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@Chuser
Below is a picture from my session that I am on right now with 18 tabs and 3 extensions running.EDIT: Oops my bad didn't noticed that most of my tabs were hibernated (in the pic I posted first), so I woke them up and started a few additional sites including a youtube video
EDIT2: Oh and just for the record those tasks you listed already add up to more than 1,2GB. What are those?
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If you have Win 10 you can see the total RAM usage of Vivaldi in the normal task manager (ctrl+shift+esc) in the Processes tab.
My Vivaldi is using 2,4 GB at the moment, although more than half of that is the GPU process (not sure why) and Facebook (400 MB). YouTube videos can also easily eat up 200-400 MB a piece.
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@Komposten said in On a Intel i5 laptop it typically takes 5 seconds to open a new window:
This is most likely your problem. You are almost using all your RAM, so when an application wants to use more RAM Windows has to compress some of the existing but not actively used stuff in the RAM and move it to your hard drive. This frees up space in RAM for your application to use, but the process is fairly slow and can cause serious system slowdowns.
Typically Windows will use all available memory. If I sort by memory usage in task manager, it just shows Vivaldi and a bunch of system services.
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So, the consensus of the forum is that I need more memory, not more CPU?
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@Chuser Yes, 4GB memory is nowadays not enough to run Vivaldi (or other browsers) efficiently on a Windows 10 system since websites are now consuming a lot of memory, especially if you have many tabs open. Even 8GB on my laptop is sometimes not enough to run Vivaldi speedy.
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@Chuser Memory gives you the most bang for your buck. In computing speed, it's often the bottleneck.
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Upgraded to 8Gb, Vivaldi doesn't take 5 seconds to open windows any more. Thanks to everyone who helped.
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